Monday, June 1. 2009

Bing Maps not yet in Bing

Bing (Preview) is live in the U.S. so I gave it my standard search test "kite boston." It rewrote it as Kites in Boston, MA and returned a kite shop some 20 miles away as the top result. I don't like that Bing rewrote the query in the input box; it'd be ok if it responded with "I thought you meant this and queried on it instead," but left my text as it was.

Amusingly:

- The provided map of results moves obediently with you as you scroll down the page. I found that distracting, but perhaps I'll get used to it.

- The map still says Microsoft Virtual Earth on it. (I just noticed that in the Google returns, the map is not logoed at all; it just includes copyright. Perhaps that's a space consideration?)

Education Tidbits

The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology introduces a minor in geospatial technology starting this fall. The local television station, via AP, offers pronunciation help:

The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology is adding a minor in geospatial (jee-oh-SPAY'-shuhl) technology, effective this fall. Tech officials say students with the minor can show potential employers they have gotten substantial training in GPS, remote sensing and other geospatial techniques.

- The Volante
- KXMC

This is the second time the US Census Bureau will use the Census in the Schools program. The package of information, sent to schools in Ohio in April encourages integration of census ideas into civics, government and geography classes. Another bonus: students can encourage parents to fill out and return census forms.

- LimaOhio.com

A letter to the editor of the by Prof Morshidi, Director, National Higher Education Research Institute (IPPTN) at the Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang to The Star responds to a government official's comment that those being trained in Geography be retrained to be more marketable. He points out the value of geography in good and bad times, as well as how the discipline combines art and science.

- The Star (Malaysia)

IAVO Research and Scientific, a geo firm located in Durham, NC, has donated more than 100 copies of its GeoGenesis image-processing software, worth some $3.2 million, to East Carolina University.

- The Reflector

TIGER in the (Amazon) Cloud

Brady at O'Reilly Radar explains how Development Seed has basically placed all the TIGER data (140 Gb of shape files) into an Amaon's Elastic Block Storage (a virtual hard drive), that can be mounted to an EC2 instance (an Amazon virtual machine).

I don't pretend to understand the underlying tech, but from what I read at the Development Seed blog, TIGER data is in the cloud, so go use it! There's census data, too stored as a public dataset, too. Amazon offers this primer on public data sets.

Amazon will take some change from you when you work with the data, so they have a vested reason to keep it available.

via @timoreilly

What Ever Happened to ...Lars Rasmussen?

Converge reports that Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens Rasmussen, who previously developed location technology that became Google Maps are behind Wave, the newly announced communications aggregations from Google.